Sam Raimi addressed the persistent rumors that he’ll direct Tobey Maguire in a fourth Spider-Man film, more than 15 years after their last collaboration.
“Well, I haven’t heard about [Spider-Man 4] yet,” Raimi, 64, told CBR while at WonderCon in Anaheim, California over the weekend. “I did read that, but I’m not actually working on it yet. I mean, Marvel and Columbia are so successful with current Spider-Man [movies], and the track there, and I don’t know that they’re going to go back to me, and say, ‘Well, folks, we can also tell that story!’”
Raimi directed Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, released from 2002 to 2007, and worked with Marvel Studios on 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
“I haven’t talked to Tobey about it, but maybe Marvel has, or Columbia Pictures. But, I just worked with Marvel on a movie called Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” he noted. “So, I’m on great terms with them. I’m sure I would hear about it if it was in the works. I think so. I don’t know.”
While Raimi isn’t sure about a Spider-Verse return, Maguire, 48, already slipped back into his super suit in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home which he starred in alongside his fellow Spideys, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland.
“I love all the new Spider-Man movies. I loved Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Raimi said. “It was really, super powerful seeing Tobey [Maguire] again in it.”
No Way Home also brought back Thomas Haden Church as Sandman, who added fuel to the fire by claiming that Raimi would reunite with Maguire for another superhero flick last month.
“There’s been some rumors that they might ask me to do another Spider-Man, and I’d do it tomorrow,” Church, 63, told ComicBook.com on March 1. “You know, they never asked me to show up in another movie, another Marvel film, but I think Sam [Raimi] is going to do another Spider-Man with Tobey [Maguire]. That’s the one that — I was actually, they had an option for me to do Spider-Man 4, when there was going to be a Spider-Man 4. They had an option on me to come back. So, if it happens, that would be fantastic.”
Maguire, for his part, has made it clear that he would be happy to play Spider-Man again. “I love these films and I love all of the different series,” he told Marvel in January 2023. “If these guys called me and said, ‘Would you show up tonight to hang out and goof around?’ or ‘Would you show up to do this movie or read a scene or do a Spider-Man thing?’ It would be a ‘yes!’ Because why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
Raimi’s first two Spider-Man movies were highly successful, but the third was a bomb at the box office and panned by critics. The inclusion of Venom (Topher Grace) was relentlessly mocked and even parodied in the Academy Award-winning animated film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Ultimately, the film concluded the franchise.
Sony, which owns Columbia Pictures, rebooted the franchise with Andrew Garfield in 2012 in order to keep the film rights to Spider-Man. Sony must put out a Spider-Man movie every five years and nine months in order to keep the rights to the webslinger. (Holland’s Spider-Man movies have been a co-production with Sony and Disney’s Marvel Studios.)
